Gabriella Waters

48, Director, Cognitive and Neurodiversity AI Lab (CoNA Lab) at the Center for Equitable AI and Machine Learning Systems at Morgan State University

Gabriella Waters sees artificial intelligence as a change agent for good. “My whole ethos is it’s meant to be a democratizing agent,” says the director of Morgan State’s Cognitive and Neurodiversity AI Lab (CoNA) at the Center for Equitable AI and Machine Learning Systems. The lab employs AI researchers, neuroscientists, psychologists and engineers to study AI and the intersections of cognition and neurodiversity, a term referring to how people’s brains interpret information differently and interact with the world around them.

The lab is researching cognitive digital twins, a kind of AI-powered computer simulation that allows scientists to replicate something in the real world, to eradicate bias in data collection. “Most AI that are trained have biases,” Waters says. “It costs money to obtain that data and preprocess it and clean it up.” Another project the lab is working on is an AI-powered platform to improve access for people with disabilities. Those two projects are indicative of Waters’s philosophy on AI, which she sees as a tool to “augment, not supplant human capability.”

“Right now, everything is driven by profit and humans are an afterthought,” she says. “But if we research it in that (democratizing) way, we can be better.”

— Lia Russell